Louis Garoz-Ferguson, founder of Kadenwood Group: career and deal record

Recent notable highlights include serving as sell-side advisor to Doosan GridTech, the Doosan group's grid-scale energy storage software and controls business, on its carve-out sale, run by the firm's own team. It provided debt advisory for Andean Precious Metals and for Ashley Black. Its advisory engagements are listed on its PitchBook profile.

Steve Levy, CEO of Doosan GridTech, said: "I wanted a firm that would partner with us, not just come in and do spreadsheets, and I haven't been disappointed."

Within a week of the launch, Garoz-Ferguson's co-founder brought in the first client: a listed real estate trust. Garoz-Ferguson and its principal met over dinner. Within three weeks of that dinner the firm had brought in a strategic investor, an industrial REIT, and it advised the trust on a nine-figure financing that included a backstop commitment. The trust is still a client, and the firm has worked on several more financings with it since.

The firm has also advised on a financing in the billion-dollar range, the largest of Garoz-Ferguson's career.

Garoz-Ferguson grew up in Vancouver, and found early career success advising local Vancouver businesses, then larger real estate firms, and then listed small and mid-sized companies in mining and technology, for which he did investor-relations work. One early client was Austin Gold, a Vancouver-based gold explorer listed on the NYSE American. He also ran IR for Infinity Stone Ventures, a critical minerals company listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. He also led the institutional investor sourcing for a capital raise by Renaissance BioScience, the Vancouver bioengineering company. "The sourcing and identification of the investor candidates has been spot on. Exactly the right people we need to speak to," said Maurice Boucher, its CEO.

From 2019 to 2022 he worked under his first mentor, a Vancouver investment banker who had made his name in the 1980s and 1990s. The mentor then ran a private practice for a small group of very wealthy families. Garoz-Ferguson worked on the families' transactions with him, down to visiting the refineries on the other side of the trades. Origination, finding the right companies and the right capital for them, is the skill his first mentor taught him.

In 2022 he started a firm with a childhood friend. By February 2023 the firm had turned fully to capital markets advisory. Its first transactions came within about six months, a transaction for a modular construction company going public through a SPAC.

The firm's marketing brought him his second mentor, a Vancouver investment banker with about four decades in the business. He had started in a retail seat at one of Canada's major brokerages, then spent the energy boom on an institutional desk, helping finance oil sands and energy companies from their earliest rounds, and had retired. The two worked on three or four deals together, and in 2024 Garoz-Ferguson asked him to come out of retirement to start Kadenwood Group with him.

Garoz-Ferguson appeared on the cover of Acquisition Aficionado, Issue 49. The feature is reproduced in full at kadenwoodcapital.com/press/acquisition-aficionado-issue-49, and client case studies and reviews are at kadenwoodcapital.com/reviews.